Ridley Scott, the filmmaker who once saw the future as a nihilistic nightmare in films like Alien and Blade Runner and his landmark “1984” Apple ad, has spent the 2020s as busy as ever. After producing a number of TV shows and movies, he’s jumped back in the director’s chair for a steady output of period pieces, some of which call back to his greatest hits, and others that take a timely, somber look at the fall of empires—whether that manifests as the infighting and egos that precede the loss of control in a fashion house or the collapse of a conqueror—possibly reflecting on the fall of the American Empire from an outsider’s point-of-view. In Scott’s final act, the struggle for control is fought just as viciously as large-scale battles with swords and gunpowder.
A genre-hopper comparable to John Huston or Howard Hawks, Scott moved from working on commercials and television to an array of stylish productions, like his second and third films that became bona fide sci-fi classics: Alien in 1979 and Blade Runner in 1982. Not satisfied with staying in space or crafting neo-noir dystopias, he swung into fantasy with Legend, helmed contemporary, women-led dramas with Thelma & Louise and G.I. Jane, delved into the bloody affairs of horror movies like Hannibal and war movies like Black Hawk Down, and shook the dust off the sword-and-sandals epic with Gladiator. As long as the stories and characters were good, there was no frontier Scott wouldn’t charge—and in true classic Hollywood fashion, he had a fondness for grand epics and worked at a dizzying pace. But after the 2017 debacle of replacing Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer in All The Money In The World, Scott stepped away from directing, breaking his prolific streak of releasing about a movie a year.
Then in 2021, Scott rode back into theaters with a knight’s tale, The Last Duel, starring Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Adam Driver, and Jodie Comer. It’s a story about a betrayal that unleashes grave consequences for all involved. The script, which Damon and Affleck co-wrote with filmmaker Nicole Holofcener, gave a multiperspective view of a crime and how the medieval courts dealt with injustice, setting up a duel between the accuser, Sir Jean de Carrouges (Damon), and the accused, his brother-in-arms Jacques Le Gris (Driver), who raped Jean’s wife, Marguerite de Carrouges (Jodie Comer).
The structure of The Last Duel recounts these events from each of the three main characters’ conflicting perspectives in the style of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Scott infusing the narrative with even more doubt as to what really happened. The mistrust between the men begins long before the assault when the promise of wealth, land, and advancement switches from Jean to Jacques due to different allegiances in the court. Money, in many of Scott’s movies, bears only poisonous fruit. After Jacques mistakes Marguerite’s attention for affection, he rapes her, setting off the men’s hatred for each other. Without a clear grasp of the facts, the allegations can only be settled by the finality of death. Jacques must fight to prove his innocence, and the bond between the de Carrouges is forever changed when Sir Jean puts Marguerite’s life up as collateral should he lose. Like Scott’s similar “fight-for-honor” feature debut, The Duellists, justice cannot be so easily restored once it’s broken.
A few short months later, Scott’s next bloody story of betrayal hit theaters. In House Of Gucci, Lady Gaga plays Patrizia, who marries into the Gucci family, unleashing a tumultuous time in the fashion house’s history that culminates with the murder of her husband, Maurizio (Adam Driver). While The Last Duel was a solemn drama, House Of Gucci verged on camp, with Lady Gaga and Jared Leto adding outsized performances to the scandalous, larger-than-life case. The hair and the jewelry were big, and the accents even bigger.
Whether intentionally funny or not, Scott’s film took interest in the family’s shifting power dynamics, especially between father Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) and son Maurizio as they fought over Patrizia and her intentions. Their split leaves Maurizio to be easily influenced by his clever new wife. But other players in the family want in on the action, even if they’re not equipped to take the company into the future, and Patrizia pounces on the division. By turning son against father, cousin against cousin, Patrizia’s naked ambition for power leaves behind only a crumbling dynasty, which no member of the Gucci family ends up controlling. Although a period piece, the dissolution of this family for the sake of monetary gains feels like a prescient cautionary tale for our greedy age today. What looks like a petty domestic drama in designer clothes is a broader reflection of money’s corruptible influence.
Like Patrizia, Scott’s next subject worked his way up from humble beginnings, following his hunger for power all the way to the top of a country’s leadership. And like her, he too met a crushing defeat for his selfish gains. Napoleon marked Scott’s return to big-budget epics, complete with large-scale battlefields and opulent costumes for each ornate scene. Using the story of Napoleon Bonaparte, Scott looked at what unbridled ambition could do to a man, following an unsmiling Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon as he rose through the ranks of the military to seize control of France and set his sights on new lands to conquer. He destroys those around him, like his love Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), and sacrifices legions fighting both for and against him in his insatiable quest for control. The lust he has for power is all-consuming, and even when he’s exiled, he cannot stay away from attempting to wrest back control until he is utterly defeated at Waterloo. Like many of the wrongdoers in Scott’s recent movies, Napoleon is a reflection of unchecked narcissism in society, people who think they know better how to rule and that they have the blessing to take what they want, upending the systems already in place.
It wasn’t until Gladiator II that Scott found a more optimistic view of the past in tumultuous times. His sequel opens with an empire already in decline with two unstable emperors at the helm. They are clueless as to how much even their own officers and conspirators resent them for their cruelty and how easy it is to manipulate them against one another. Outside the behind-the-scenes scheming that would make Gucci‘s Patrizia proud, Lucius (Paul Mescal), who has lost most of his family to Rome’s cruelty, champions a better vision for the people. He survives the gauntlet of the Colosseum, which the ruling class uses to divide the people against one another. As the representative of the next generation, Lucius must fight for what he believes in, not to replicate the old petty orders of revenge but find a new way forward. In revisiting one of the crowning achievements in his cinematic career, Scott and his screenwriter, Napoleon scribe David Scarpa, emphasize the importance of not carrying on old, destructive ways, drawing similarities to the erosion in trust in the government, turning people against one another, and the various backroom deals that lead further into corruption, positioning the ancient Roman Empire like a warning for the modern-day U.S. empire.
The Dog Stars is a continuation of Scott’s late-period shift, exploring how greed pushes people to harm others, and the fallout of societal failure. Like Lucius in Gladiator II, The Dog Stars’ Hig (Jacob Elordi) is a bright-eyed, hopeful soul standing in the ruins of a once-great civilization. The question they each face is how to salvage their societies when their dynasties have crumbled—what does justice and law and order look like in a kinder world, and how do you avoid power-hungry despots from seizing power once again? Neither Gladiator II nor The Dog Stars offers solutions because Scott’s not interested in finding the answers for a fallen empire, just the struggle to survive and emerge from the ruins.
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